Docker presentation at FOSS4G conference

o2r team member Daniel Nüst recently participated in the worlds largest conference for geospatial open source software. The FOSS4G 2016 was hosted by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and took place close to home, namely in Bonn. Therefore Daniel was extremely happy that his talk “An overview of Docker images for geospatial applications” was voted to be presented by the OSGeo community. Daniel presented an evaluation into the existing containers for FOSS4G software. After an introduction into Docker and some live demos, the takeaway was that everybody should use Docker more, and many different application scenarios (development, demos, training, cloud deployment) exist.

The presentation was very well attended (~ 120 people), albeit taking place in the first session on Friday morning after the conference dinner the night before. Reactions on Twitter were also quite positive, several good questions were asked, and great discussions followed throughout the day.

The main part of the work is published in the OSGeo wiki: a comprehensive list of Docker containers published by projects or third parties to use a large variety of tools, libraries, or Desktop applications in Docker containers. Check out the list at https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/DockerImages. Contributions are welcome!

How is this related to the o2r project? The expertise build up around Docker should be shared with the communities we know. And more concretely, many applications in the geospatial world are build upon services and APIs, so scientific work building upon these APIs will require to archive such services, too. This is a topic we will experiment on in the second year of o2r.

As some popular projects surprisingly did not have Docker images yet, Daniel started a new independent project on GitHub to provide a place for FOSS4G-related containers and to expand the knowledge and application of containers for geospatial applications: geocontainers. Inspired by Biodocker, geocontainers is intended to be a place to experiment and collaborate on containers without any initial rules or guidelines.

The conference was excellently organized in a great venue which includes the former Plenary Chambers of the Bundestag. Indeed a very special place to meet the people behind the projects of Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial.